Rev Simpkins (with John Callaghan): Album Launch Gig, The Commons Café @ The Minories, Colchester, 6 June 2025
The Commons Café at The Minories is in the cultural quarter of Colchester. Across the street from Colchester Castle and with Firstsite Gallery opposite its rear entrance, The Minories itself is an arts charity and gallery in an historic townhouse.
Friday nights at Firstsite are late-night opening, affording me the opportunity to view the provocative mix of new work from renowned British African-Caribbean interdisciplinary artist Elsa James in her first major solo exhibition at Firstsite, which examines the heart of Britain’s colonial past and its lasting impact on Black life today. As James has stated, ‘The show explores the rupture, erasure, and fragmentation of histories that shape Black life in the diaspora, inviting moments of understanding, healing, and community connection.’
Tonight, though is primarily about the return of Anglican priest and non-conformist musician, the Rev’d Matthew Simpkins, who, as Rev Simpkins and one half of Pissabed Prophet, has an amazing track record of exuberant creativity from his psychedelic gospel epic ‘Big Sea’ through the tender banjo-led laments of ‘Saltings’ to the riotous explosion of unfettered joy that is the Pissabed Prophet album and its subsequent EP ‘Apple’. All were created post 2019, when Simpkins was diagnosed with a rare form of malignant melanoma. His experiences in this time have opened up a rich new seam of creativity in Simpkins’ musical career, characterised by his capacity to find hope during dark times and capture this in celebratory music.
His new album Headwater, a collection of fever dreams and reflections on awe and delirium, was recorded with his son Jim, in the aftermath of an extreme reaction to immunotherapy treatment for stage 4 cancer. Using analogue oscillators and synthesisers, he tried to recreate the sounds and visions he experienced on the hospital ward during three extended periods in hospital with aseptic meningitis, as music. Then, as he convalesced at home, he worked with Jim to flesh out these sketches into songs.
This is a process of creation that he used previously to great effect on ‘Spooling’ from the Pissabed Prophet album. That song was born in the resonance field of an MRI machine as Simpkins tried to keep himself sane by mentally harmonising over the deafening noise of a medical scanner. ‘Headwater’ similarly charts an extraordinary journey of recovery and creation, from a time approaching death, to the moment when he became the first person to be discharged from care services provided by his local hospice-at-home team.
This album launch gig begins, however, with another of Antigen Records roster of wacky, off-the-wall yet thought-provoking artists, John Callaghan.
Callaghan, producer of several videos for Simpkins, opens with his tinfoil tentacles held by unsuspecting audience members that enable him to play chords with their hands and extemporise over them. Resplendent in his light entertainment suit festooned with light bulbs, he conjures up a dizzying swirl of rhythmic beeps and bleeps that underpin and carry his witty meditations on materiality and identity. ‘Forgive Yourself’ – ‘be good to yourself, be kind to yourself and let it go’ – and ‘Tear My Body Out’ – ‘Would you Adam and Eve it / Uncover your eyes / And see what beautiful, beautiful people we are’ – being key expressions of his ethos. In the set-concluding ‘Tear My Body Out’, the light entertainment suit comes off to reveal a half suit, half nude leggings combo in which he undertakes forays into the audience turning attention onto the beautiful yet wacky and complex people each of us are.
Simpkins begins his set with three songs from Saltings, mostly performed solo with banjo. The first, ‘John Henry’s Prayer’, highlights a thread running through his albums with prayers and services from the Anglican tradition regularly being sung or referenced. These are among the resources that enable him to find hope in the health challenges that he and others close to him have faced and which enable him to sing ‘There’s always beauty to find’. Although not finding a place at this gig, this strand of the Rev’s work is carried on in ‘Headwater’, in particular through ‘Keep Silence’, an instrumental setting of an early Greek hymn.
Songs from Headwater begin with the title track, a reflection on the raging of the big sea internally through the fever dreams and delirium experienced during his treatment. Experiences of sailing on the Blackwater inform many of the Rev’s songs, these being, as Stephen Cottrell, Archbishop of York, noted of ‘Big Sea’, ‘wrung from the depths of personal foreboding, stare unflinchingly at these deep, dark waters’. Here, the chorus states ‘You rule the raging of the seas’ while in the coda he sings, ‘I was born and I was dead / Pour your water on my head’.
A trio of songs – ‘Bleephead’, ‘Life in the Bell Jar’ and ‘Squirrels’ – document the surreality inherent in the forms of treatment he has received:
Bleephead glitching hard
Brain spewing broken sense and wonder
Synthesizing sentiments
From lightning without thunder
As ever with Simpkins, difficulty and danger are also leavened with humour and exuberance such as is seen in ‘Squirrels’, one of the songs for which Callaghan has provided an equally surreal video. Songs from Pissabed Prophet proffer much of the sing-along exuberance on offer tonight, with Simpkins being joined for these by partner-in-crime, Ben Brown.
Partway through Simpkins acknowledges the irony of using an indie guitar band to launch an album of electronica. Though the songs gain a different kind of power from this treatment, it does mean that the only electronica on offer tonight is that provided by John Callaghan. Each of the Rev’s albums differ in style and Headwater takes us into new ruminative territory with its industrial electronic soundscapes and use of drones and silences to bring us into contemplation. With its combination of dance, drone, spirituality and stillness, the album inhabits similar space to that opened up by the Revolutionary Army of the Infant Jesus, as well as sharing some synergies with the indie electronica and distressed vocalising of later Low albums.
For Simpkins to have come through his treatment as he has is wonderful. His creative responses – marvellous music surrounding and shaping depth of insight – are genuinely amazing. His illness inspired him to return to his original calling in music and setting out to sail that big sea has enabled him to explore both the depths of human experience and the redemptive power of music. Join him at the brink, risking the roar and rage, by allowing the waters of this latest stage of his journey to pour on your head.
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Jonathan Evens
Headwater by Rev Simpkins & Jim Simpkins, Antigen Records, 2025
Available on Bandcamp here
‘Who is Rev Simpkins?’ Find out more here.
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